A World on Fire_ Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War - Amanda Foreman [427]
The British press was united over the tragedy of Lincoln’s violent death. Newspapers that had routinely criticized the president during his lifetime rushed to praise him. On April 28 and again on May 1, The Times printed long eulogies to the late president. “The feeling which the death of Mr. Lincoln has excited in England is in no degree confined to the advocates of the Northern cause, it has shown itself just as strongly among the friends of the South,” the paper declared. “We feel confident that a sorrow in which both nations may without exaggeration be said to share cannot pass without leaving them better acquainted with each other, and more inclined to friendship … than they were before.”38.5 This was a wild hope, and the editors knew it; William Howard Russell could not help writing smugly in his diary: “Had The Times followed my advice how different our position would be—not only that of the leading journal but of England!”31
Despite being the primary instigator and cause of The Times’ wildly biased reporting of the war, Francis Lawley escaped vilification because he was not a journalist by profession. The paper’s New York correspondent, Charles Mackay, on the other hand, was castigated for betraying his trade. The Spectator accused him of doing “probably more than any other single man to diffuse error concerning the great issue involved, and to imperil the cause of human freedom.”32 The Times’ managing editor, Mowbray Morris, belatedly realized the damage caused to the paper’s reputation by its pro-Southern reporting and dismissed Mackay from his post in a scathing letter that laid the entire blame for The Times’ position on his shoulders alone. The Economist also felt obliged to explain away its previous condemnations of Lincoln, claiming that over the past four years “Power and responsibility visibly widened [Lincoln’s] mind and elevated his character.”33 But it was Punch that performed the greatest volte-face. Three weeks earlier, on April 8, the magazine had placed Lincoln in a gallery of April Fools that included Napoleon III and the MPs Roebuck, Bright, and Disraeli. The combination of embarrassment, shame, and shock that Lincoln was killed while watching his play moved Tom Taylor, the magazine’s senior contributor, to browbeat his colleagues into giving him a free hand to compose an abject apology and homage to the late president. The editor, Mark Lemon, supported him, telling the staff, “The avowal that we have been a bit mistaken [over Lincoln and the war] is manly and just.” Taylor did not hold back: “Between the mourners at his head and feet, Say, scurril-jester, is there room for you?” he asked contritely. Lincoln “had lived to shame me from my sneer, / To lame my pencil, and confute my pen, / To make me own this kind of prince’s peer, / This rail-splitter a true-born king of men. / My shallow judgment I had learned to rue.”34
Ill.61 Britannia sympathizes with Columbia, Punch, May 1865.
Moran’s usual cynicism was temporarily overcome when he attended a mass meeting at St. James’s Hall, Piccadilly, on April 30:
The room was draped in black and three United States flags were gracefully entwined in crape at the east end of the room. The floor, the balcony, the galleries, and the platform of the great hall were literally packed with ladies and gentlemen.… The warmth of the applause, the earnest detestation of the murder, and the condemnation of slavery made me inwardly vow that hereafter I would think better of the feelings entertained towards us by Englishmen than ever before. And that if ever any chance of quarrel should occur between the two Countries, and I should hear an uniformed countryman of mine denouncing honestly and mistakenly, the spirit of England towards us,